TL;DR at the bottom
Dating in 2022: Why Do So Many Straight Men Hate Astrology?
This is the title to an article that popped up on my twitter feed this morning after I delt with a cockroach in the entryway of my apartment. Already on edge by the cockroach, I was primed and ready to be irrationally furious about an overly generalizing article. I am neither straight nor a man, but I do not believe in astrology, and as such an article that is quick to decry the dislike of astrology as some pathology of the straight and the male will cause minor internal outrage. In clicking on the article, I had hoped it would be an eye-catching headline for an otherwise tame article, one which I would forget as soon as I was done reading, with non-controversial statements such as “some men are misogynistic”. Unfortunately, the title was the least provocative aspect of the piece. Instead of being greeted by uncontroversial, boring takes, I saw some of the dumbest, and most inflammatory bullshit to ever flash on my monitor. This is an exaggeration, but not a substantial one. As a preview, at one point the article claims that the medical practices of 17th century doctors is evidence of the existence of astrology, as if 17th century doctors, famed for their bloodletting and rubbing garlic on blistering wounds while saying a prayer, were anywhere near comparable to modern medicine in terms of validity. So, after reading the article I decided enough was enough. I am going to say my peace about astrology, the ridiculous nature of astrological belief, and more fundamentally, the problem with some of the most extreme practitioners of astrology. In saying this, a very important caveat must be made:
With that caveat out of the way, its time for some basics.
As I explained here , I’m a hardline materialist. That basically means that I do not believe in anything that isn’t material, and thus observable. Because of this, any and all metaphysical beliefs, such as believing in God, and afterlife, the soul, ghosts, or astrology, are rejected by me on the grounds of their lack of observability and thus falsifiability. This is important in understanding my feelings towards astrology, as I reject it on philosophical grounds. I don’t believe in astrology because it cannot be falsified, it cannot be falsified because it is metaphysical. Any supernatural link between one’s birth sign and a plethora of other factors relating to astrological study and their personality is necessarily not falsifiable, and as such I reject it. Because of this, it becomes clear why I get frustrated when people assume my lack of belief in astrology, god, ghosts, or any other aspect of the supernatural must be born from some psychological flaw.
Growing up in a catholic family, I had to endure plenty of priests and other older religious folks telling me that there is something wrong with me for not being as religious as them, or for being skeptical of the church. This experience has shown me firsthand what the effects of having your sanity questioned on the grounds of rejecting a religious or spiritual dogma can have. If let isolated, and frustrated. I have always loved hearing other people’s beliefs, dialogue, understanding the world around me and the people with in it, and having my beliefs and ideals questioned. To me, every encounter with a person who believes something different than me is an opportunity to learn, and learning is one of my favorite things. This becomes difficult if not impossible, however, when the person I’m trying to learn from is too busy calling me mentally unwell for not believing in their specific brand of metaphysics. This then brings me to the gross minority of astrology believers who seem to genuinely believe something is wrong with me because I don’t believe in their metaphysics. I’ve seen it on twitter, Facebook, reddit, and beyond—people I knew, or I thought were friends, making posts discussing the lack of belief in astrology in the same breath they discuss the hatred of women and queer folks. Being a woman and queer folk who very much loves many women and queer folks and would never want to harm them, it is disquieting to say the least to be told I am harming them because of my lack of belief. This is obviously not true, and any reasonable person will know this isn’t true. This is similar to arguing that someone being a Muslim necessarily means they are homophobic and want to kill gay people. Of course, you can’t make that kind of generalization, and just because there are Muslims out there who are homophobic doesn’t mean that we should assume that Islam as a whole is a red flag for bigotry that should be considered in social interactions with Muslim people. Similarly, you can’t assume that because someone doesn’t believe in astrology, they hate women and queer folks. That being said, I largely ignored these posts, and stopped interacting with friends who declared these opinions, that is, until I read the aforementioned article.
To prevent the misrepresentation of the article I will be criticizing for the duration of this blog post, I will be linking the article here , and will be summarizing it if you don’t want to read the whole thing, although I do recommend reading it, as my summary will not be the equivalent of actually reading it, and there is obviously a clear potential for my bias to enter my summary, as I do hate this article a lot.
The article in question starts off well, with some things I largely agree with. Initially discussing the problem of current meme and hookup culture rejecting anyone who believes in or is fascinated by astrology is a genuine problem. A lot of men, as the article correctly states, will often ignore and reject people solely on the grounds of their belief in astrology, and I think this is an issue. There is little that can be said reliably about someone just because they have their star sign in their bio, and even the most ardent believers in astrology are people beyond this belief and deserving of just as much attention and respect as any other person. This should be an uncontroversial statement but is unfortunately not online. However, the article takes a quick turn shortly after, and the first warning sign of what this article really is, is shown. At the bottom of the introduction is the following statement: “There are thousands of viral memes and TikTok videos that all seem to echo the same opinion: people who like astrology are naïve, stupid, unhinged, and undateable. I turned to the experts to get to the root of the issue.” (Deibe, 2022). What experts, and why are they needed? We’ll soon see.
In the next section, a psychologist and sex therapist Barbara Santini is referenced when trying to uncover the mystery of why some people don’t all believe in astrology, coming to the profoundly ridiculous statement “To most men, astrology is too girly or immature, which explains why they disagree with it or deny its validity” (Deibe, 2022). This is problematic for a number of reasons that I will go over soon. The next section explains away some misconceptions with astrology, which itself is not a problem. Correcting misunderstandings regarding astrology is not a problem, what is a problem is the article’s assertion that men rejecting astrology is fundamental to their nature, arguing that men are sun aligned, which is fixed to the sign Leo, and thus they are more stubborn in their beliefs. This is just biological essentialism with extra steps, which will have its own section later. Following this, the article goes into connections to astrology and witchcraft, and how the Catholic church is to blame for the vilification of astrology and other “feminine” practices such as herbalism and divination. Although not necessarily untrue, it does feed into a greater problem with the article. The last and worst section of the article is subtitled ‘Is Astrology Scientifically Proven’, and is perhaps the most profoundly stupid things I have ever read, right next to those saying astrology is the merger of spiritualism and science because it involves stars. As such, the last section requires its own summary
There are few things I hate more than the smugness of those that think they’re right but aren’t. This final section is the platonic ideal of this smugness. Opening with the assertion that men always make the same argument when dismissing astrology—that it isn’t scientifically proven. The rebuttal of this? “I hate to break it to you, but astrology and astronomy were actually studied together as a science until the 1700s.” (Deibe, 2022). I don’t think I need to explain why stating that something being treated as science in the past before many of the basic philosophical rules of science were properly defined, but I will anyway soon. The section continues to cite Kings and queens relying on astrologers to make decisions, and medieval doctors using birth charts as diagnostic material, that is until the Catholic church came to town and told everyone it was bad, and “everyone just…. believed it” (Deibe, 2022). This is the peak of ridiculous bullshit in the article, there is more bullshit, but this is the peak. The article then follows this up by stating that the a reason there *might* not be any scientific proof of astrology is because there’s no funding to research it, and that maybe if it was researched, proof would be found. The article then cites a Colorado state university study that found vets see a dramatic increase in the number of pets taken to the emergency room during the full moon. We’ll go over that study, and why its use here is ridiculous, but before we do, the final nail in the coffin for this article must be elucidated. In the final part of this rollercoaster ride of an article, the dislike of astrology is attributed to toxic masculinity, newspaper star signs, and social conditioning.
Okay, now that I’ve summarized the article, while including plenty of bias, which is why you should just read the article yourself, its finally time to break it down.
The best place to start breaking this article down is in the central crux of the article: the notion that astrology is so obviously true that anyone who rejects it must have something wrong with them. This is ethically problematic, which I’ll explain soon, but before that its important to justify why its wrong on a factual basis. To do this, we have to investigate the empirical claim that astrology is obviously real. For that, I’ll pull your attention to a study by McGrew and McFall (1990), which assesses the validity of astrologer claims. In the study, 6 astrologers were asked to match 23 birth charts to various casefiles for volunteers. This was then compared to a control group of non-astrologers making blind guesses. The study found, unsurprisingly, that astrologers were no better than non-astrologers in matching respective birth charts to specific individuals. These results were supported by numerous other studies, all of which failed to find any support for astrology empirically (Komath, 2009; Crowe, 1990). And what articles do proport the validity of astrology are universally and severely methodologically flawed (Genovese, 2014). But even if they weren’t deeply flawed methodologically and statistically, the existence of articles that dispute the validity of astrology itself demonstrates that there are clear and legitimate reasons to be skeptical of the claims of astrologists, beyond being skeptically minded in general.
So, astrology is clearly not *obviously* true, so the base assumption the article makes in all of its later assertions is false. This should be enough on its own to reject the article in its entirety, but I will go further. Not only are the empirical assumptions of the article false, most especially the claim that there aren’t any studies on the validity of astrology, as I found several with just a few minutes of looking through google scholar with the search terms “astrology validity”, but the ethical implications of these claims are deeply troubling.
In terms of ethics, we have to consider what is being implied. First, we must take it as assumption that astrology is obviously true, which is suspect. But if we take this assumption to be true, we must then assert that the skepticism of it is necessarily a sign of bigotry or something being wrong psychologically. To do this, we must make a set of generalizations about the motivations in lacking belief, such that being misinformed, or having a lack of information, or general skepticism are rejected as potentials to lack belief in astrology. Following these generalizations, you must then use these generalizations to otherize those that are encompassed within these generalizations so that their difference of opinion is clearly aberrant. This is deeply unethical from a rule consequentialist perspective, which is detailed under the rule utilitarian section here , as it creates a society in which those that disagree in a central dogma are separated into an otherized category that has been generalized to be within this category. This is not necessarily a problem, as we do this for beliefs systems such as fascism, but it becomes a problem when we consider the nature of a lack of belief as compared to the nature of a belief. To not believe is to exist in a state of neutrality. Before someone discovers information, they necessarily do not believe in that information as they are unaware, but to generalize a skepticism towards what is unknown as equally problematic as a rejection of what is known to be true on the grounds of bigotry fundamentally alters the rule of categorizing people based on their problematic beliefs. It does this by creating a broken category, and thus people as they exist by default are considered deviant, which creates a bad rule by which society ought function.
Therefore, this article is both factually incorrect, and ethically untenable
With the primary refutation of the article done, I can now focus on some of the ridiculous statements held within, and make fun of them, because that sounds like a fun time. If it doesn’t sound like a fun time for you, you can stop reading now, I’m done with the hard-hitting section of this blog post, and the rest is just for laughs.
So, probably the dumbest implication the article makes is that doctors before the 1700s and medieval kings and queens are in any way valid sources of scientific knowledge. So, lets just go over some of the things that medieval doctors’ thought would treat the black plague in the 14th century. This includes the famous bloodletting and leeches, but also vinegar, onions, garlic, putting a chicken’s freshly plucked ass against buboes, snake meat, flagellation, fire, unicorn horns, and perhaps the best of all, human shit. If only modern doctors hadn’t just…...listened when the catholic church said human shit wasn’t a good medicine, maybe today we would still have doctors using astrological charts to diagnose the black plague. But our stalwart author of this dumb ass article surely believes that we should be using human feces to treat illnesses, as if we are to believe that astrology is valid because past doctors used it during diagnosis, surely they must also know what they’re doing when it comes to treatment. Unless its their diagnosis that is good, and not their treatment, in which case I guess we should assume that demon possession is the case of pretty much every psychological disorder, and we should torture people with various disorders to cure them of their literal fucking demons. And Kings and Queens making strategic decisions used astrologers? Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw, the English Monarchy is so famously good at making decisions and not committing horrible atrocities throughout history at all, this just proves astrology right there!
The final little treat from this article is its one reference to the scientific validity of astrology, an article that found an increase in emergency visit to the vet during a full moon, a fact that has nothing at all to do with the cultural fears we have during the full moon at all, and surely would not cause an increased awareness of potential odd behaviors among pets which might cause them to be taken to the vet in increased numbers. Not only that, we have clear secular explanations that seem a lot more likely than stars billions of light years away influencing the behavior of animals on a supernatural level, full moons have an increase in light levels, which may cause changes in behavior. In other words, the only piece of evidence that the author provides does a terrible job of proving anything. This article is, in the parlance of our time, cringe.
This article is terrible. It is emblematic of all the close-minded bullshit I hate about some people who believe in astrology. It is not representative of people who believe in astrology in general, but is absolutely a problem for the ones who do act like this. It represents a complete and total disrespect of others and their beliefs, and is fundamentally irrational and unethical. Don’t be like this article, don’t be shitty.
Crowe, R. A. (1990). Astrology and the Scientific Method. Psychological Reports, 67(1), 163–191. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1990.67.1.163
Deibe, I. (2022). Dating in 2022: Why Do So Many Straight Men Hate Astrology? POPSUGAR.https://www.popsugar.co.uk/love/why-do-straight-men-hate-astrology-48848255?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=post&utm_campaign=POPSUGARUK#content
Genovese, J. E. C. (2014). A Failed Demonstration of Sun Sign Astrology. Comprehensive Psychology. https://doi.org/10.2466/03.17.CP.3.16
Mcgrew, H., J. (1990). A Scientific Inquiry Into the Validity of Astrology. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 4(1), 75-83.
Nitschke, L. (2021). The Black Death (10 Medieval Cures). The Collector. hhttps://www.thecollector.com/the-black-death-medieval-cures/
Komath, M. (2009). Testing astrology. Current Science, 96(12), 1568–1572. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24104881
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